Room for improvement: Kate McNally’s Thought for the Week
‘Our heroes always have feet of clay.’
The controversy around renaming the William Penn room at Friends House has produced many arguments. One of the common ones is that we are rewriting history. But there are no new historical facts here. We have always known that William Penn was an enslaver. The only new fact is that we now care.
As Friends, with a Testimony to Equality and a promise to be anti-racist, we naturally feel some guilt about having revered an enslaver. And it’s hard to accept that we as individuals are imperfect. This unease creates the cognitive dissonance we are seeing in this discussion.
Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort that results when our actions conflict with our values. We might feel it if we drive a car while campaigning for climate change, say. In the room discussion, the dissonance comes from our belief that racism is wrong and that we are good people. This doesn’t square with the fact that some of our actions, as well as some of the actions of Penn, who we admire, were racist. The dissonance we feel in the context of racism has another name: white fragility.
What is creating the dissonance here is the fact that we didn’t care that Penn was an enslaver. It’s not the historical fact of Penn’s enslavement of people that is the problem for us, but the newly-acknowledged fact that we didn’t care until now. It’s not about Penn and the customs of his time; the custom of our time demands that we bring enslaving into the light.
Viewed through this lens, the arguments about renaming rooms, or buildings, or taking down statues, can be understood as efforts to reduce the guilt we feel. If it’s OK to leave the rooms or the buildings or the statues, then it’s OK not to notice that these are racist. Then we are not obliged to notice that we ourselves are racist.
Perhaps another way to reduce the dissonance is to recognise that it is caused by the reverence we want to feel for someone who is flawed. There are two ways we might reduce this. First, we might remember and accept that we are all flawed, that we can simultaneously do good things and bad things, and that our heroes always have feet of clay. In this way we can live with William Penn’s racism and perhaps begin to live with our own.
Secondly, we might question the need to revere other people. Perhaps instead of celebrating individuals it would be better to celebrate the actions that let their lives speak. Examples might be creating a space for religious freedom, fighting enslavement, or working for equal rights and climate and racial justice. The list is long.
Then perhaps we can let go of the distraction of room names and begin the hard work of understanding our own racism. When we can bear to look at that, we may find ourselves needing to know more about white fragility and the structural racism that has benefitted those of us who are white. When we are formed in a racist society, it’s not our fault if we are racist. However, it is our fault if we choose to stay racist.
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